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Ah yes, the early days.

My first escape into Internet-land through AOL dialup.

"Spam" and "malware" were things you ate and a reference to how you're wearing something wrong.

When eBay was a place to earn some serious money. Now it's filled to the point that it's hard to compete, and their fees eat all of your profits.

Those were the days...

IMME

400 million to become the source of all spam....Hotmail.

The international space station did not exist in 1992.

imichaeldotorg, on 19 June 2012 - 07:43 AM, said:

Er, I meant 1991. Here are the details on STS-43, the mission which carried a Macintosh Portable. http://support.apple...iewlocale=en_US

Talk about incomplete! No mention of sendmail? Eudora? ....

And where is BITNET? I used my 1200baud modem to connect to the university VAX(?) so that I could read my bitnet e-mail in the early 80s!

No mention of IBM's PROFs???

College (university) students had access to "the Internet" in 1985?

No. In 1985, when I had been using email for two years, there were Arpanet, EARN, Bitnet and its Canadian equivalent Netnorth, and perhaps a couple of other interlinked multi-location networks. I communicated with Americans on Bitnet and Brits on Earn (with their backward email addresses: username at "uk.ac.durham"), as well as some Americans at some universities on Arpanet with their .edu suffixes instead of the .bitnet we and many others had.

Sometime around 1987 or 1988, we got an email from our university IT department informing us that we, and other networks would be joining a new network with the name "Internet" (a proper noun, without any "the", just like the ones that preceded it). No students or anyone else for that matter in 1985 were on Internet, let alone "the" Internet, a coinage of some journalist from what I can tell that appeared several years after Internet had been around and growing. Even the early media reports used the correct name rather than adding the barbarous and unnecessary definite article.

shawn@acc on the ARPA net before the D was added... I googled and there are still a couple of old e-mails still floating around!!! So be careful what you e-mail as it may NEVER go away!!!

"You've Got Mail!" is too seminal and influential not to be included in a history of email, or so you would think.